• Many marketing departments do not fully understand the Process! The reason marketing departments outsource their complex campaigns to telemarketing companies is that the pros understand how important each step of the process is to the final result.
• Many marketing departments do not have the proper automation tools! Powerful telemarketing tools have not been available to corporate marketing departments until now. Sensight's LeadFish is a groundbreaking tool.
  
• Many marketing departments do not execute well! Without the proper tools it is almost impossible to execute in today’s complex marketing environment. LeadFish is the marketing pro's trustworthy guide to following best practices.

The Process! Documentation, campaign building, list cleaning & de-duping, scoring, QC, nurturing, fulfillment, reporting, exporting; each step is important to the final result. Sensight is not just collection of related modules and functions; with LeadFish your campaign will flow naturally through each step of the process. By using LeadFish you will be executing best practices used by successful companies. These are the methods taught in marketing schools and reported in direct marketing periodicals.

Automation tools! Telemarketing companies have developed proprietary automation tools. Sensight was developed in telemarketing companies and adapted for use in corporate marketing departments. Sensight automates the complexity of a marketing campaign.

Execution! When you deploy LeadFish you will have the power to execute multiple, complex and highly successful campaigns.

In a nutshell, the typical telemarketing process begins with writing a detailed Program Document that specifies every aspect of a campaign; questions, scores, dialogue, incoming, sources, background info, and much more. Typically a programmer turns this document into a call center program. This process is time consuming and expensive if done well. Sensight turns this process upside down.

In LeadFish the Campaign Setup Wizard guides the Marketing Manager (no programmer required) through setting up a new campaign by choosing a template with the most desirable options and then continues to guide the manager through the template’s screens where the empty fields are filled-in or modified from the template. In the last step the Setup Wizard prints out the Program Document which matches the data and options selected. This PDF document can be printed for the team to markup with revisions before the campaign goes live. Red lines in the Program Document indicate omissions in setup and orange lines prompt one to re-examine options. If the Campaign Document has no red lines then the program will have no errors.

The traditional method of writing a Program Document and then building the program from the document is difficult and time consuming. Sensight radically reduces the time to produce a campaign and eliminates errors, enabling a Marketing Manager to build a campaign and have it ready for calling in a very short timeframe.

Let’s be clear from the start, lead scoring is not a function, it is a process. And without an automated scoring system it would be practically impossible to implement the process. Lead scoring simply put, is a method of assigning a numeric value, a score, to a contact ‘touch’ using weighted criteria. A scoring system will add to or subtract from the score every time a contact is re-touched. When the score reaches a pre-defined number and/or criteria, the contact is defined as a qualified lead and is passed off from marketing to sales. The contact can also be returned to marketing if sales determines that it needs further nurturing. The objective of scoring is to produce qualified leads that are prioritized for sales calls in order of sales potential.

A touch can be a telemarketing call, an email follow-up, a web page clicked, a web inquiry form, a webinar watched, an event attended, a white paper downloaded, etc. Let’s define these touches from various sources as marketing ‘channels’ so we are on the same page with terminology. A score is pre-assigned to each of these touches. In a real example, the BANT* info collected from a telemarketing call indicates the contact has the project authority but the timeframe is in the future. Having a project and being the decision maker yields a high score but the timeframe deducts from the score leaving a combined score of 40. On the other hand, if all we know about this contact is that he downloaded a white paper then this touch may only be scored a 10. A more complex criteria might score the white paper download a 15 if the download follows after the telemarketing call resulting in a combined score of 55. This would show interest in your client’s product for the contact’s project.

In our industry lead scoring is an enterprise system that integrates all the marketing channels into a multi-touch, multi-channel, closed loop process. On one side the lead scoring system interoperates with the client’s CRM and on the other side all of the client’s marketing channels interoperate with the lead scoring system.

*BANT – Budget / Authority / Need / Timeframe

When we set strategies for our marketing group one of the things that is always asked is what is the expected ROI. But we have to be careful about letting this be the deciding factor in our decisions. The reason is explained by answering a simple question; would we prefer a 20:1 ROI that achieved half our sales goal or a 5:1 ROI that achieved all of our sales goal?

In a recent review of a lead-gen campaign the contact list was split in two. One half was started on an e-mailing campaign while the other was exposed only to telemarketing. Results were tallied for the two months the campaign was run. From the original list the e-mailing resulted in 58 leads; the telemarketing generated 31 leads. E-mailing almost doubled the number of leads that telemarketing did. But follow-up showed that only 4 e-mail leads resulted in a closed sale. The leads provided through telemarketing closed 14 sales. Because of its low operating cost the e-mail campaign had a 23:1 ROI. On the other side, the telemarketing campaign had a 16:1 ROI but more than triple the sales.

This is a classic example of why we must be careful not let our measurements get in the way of our goals. If this company had decided they should only market through the channel with the highest ROI they would not have had as much sales growth as they did. With a little more investment they more than tripled their sales and were able to hit their sales goal.

In any lead-gen marketing campaign the end goal is the same. We want to produce the most leads as fast as possible. But what does that mean? Let’s look a little closer.

First off… what is a lead? To some a lead might mean little more than the contact info of someone working within the industry we serve. Perhaps a bit simplistic but it works for some.  But it doesn’t address the end-game. The true goal is to generate leads that end in closed sales. So what we really want out of our lead-gen campaign is the most “closeable” leads.

All right, how or when do we know if a contact is closeable (or sales-ready)? This starts with a collaborative effort between the sales and marketing departments. By reviewing previous sales efforts (successful or not), strategic direction, product/service offered and the target market we can come up with a quite detailed profile of the type of contact that will likely result in a closed sale. Once we know the target profile we have a list of attributes that we can use to filter our contact list.

Great, so how can we quickly determine those in our contact list that meet our target profile? The primary tools in use are telemarketing and e-mailing campaigns. However, we might be better served by understanding what they actually deliver because we are really looking at two different animals.

The best practice e-mailing campaigns use a multi-touch approach that moves a contact from a low to high level of awareness and appreciation (demand) of our company/product/service. These best practice campaigns include the use of in-depth tools to watch/listen to the actions taken with messages sent and websites/landing pages visited. We collect data from these interactions and try to interpret its meaning often employing a scoring system to gauge the strength or weakness of the lead. Unfortunately the only way we get actual profile data is by asking for it through a webform. This is good but the reality is that many decision-makers/influencers tend to withhold this info until they are well along in the selection process. So if we think this through logically we see that an e-mailing campaign is really a tactic better suited  for demand-generation.

The best practice telemarketing campaigns are designed to gather the profile information needed to identify how closeable the contact is. As a matter of fact, we want little effort made by our tele-reps in building demand so as not to come off as a sales call. With well-designed lead rating systems we can quickly determine the sales-readiness of these contacts based on actual profile data received directly from the contact. With contacts that are rated not sales-ready we determine what future nurturing and callbacks to use. This is a great time to initiate a demand generating e-mail campaign. The bottom line is that telemarketing calls are much better at finding the buyer’s profile. With this you can easily determine the leads that result in more closed sales.

The best campaigners employ both tactics to grow their business. But it’s important to remain clear on what one actually gets from each.

The response rate on email campaigns is 2%. What about the other 98%? Are you reaching them? Sure enough, email campaigns are the cheapest, easiest way to get your message out to 2% of your potential clients. What are you doing to reach the vast untapped potential of the 98%?  If you are not doing much then you have a big problem. And your problems are going to get even bigger if you spend all your time and budget installing automation software to reach the 2%.

Let us give you an example from the financial industry. There are 100s, if not 1000s, of investment newsletters and advisories for financial services and investment advice. These services rely heavily on email marketing for client retention and new client acquisition. Often these newsletters and advisories send out investment teasers every day - weekends included. And get this; every day has brand new content. Do you have the resources to send out 1000s of emails every day with new content? Another problem with this approach is that prospective investors will stay on these lists to get free advice even if they do not subscribe. How many on your list are going to opt in and subscribe or purchase? Is this your formula for success?

Check out one of our platinum partners who markets to the 98% - Direct Marketing Partners. DMP is a company that understand how to mix the human touch with email follow-up and tracking to achieve better results. This is the Sensight approach. DMP uses the LeadFish Software Suite and offers a full range of services. The DMP website has an abundance of good marketing information.

Direct Marketing for the "other" 98%

Call centers are often thought of as large office rooms full of cubicles with dozens of people chattering away to thousands of contacts everyday (think the movie Boiler Room). These places will never work in the B2B lead-gen world because most companies have a more technical sale with a longer sales cycle. Corporate buyers would never stand for a boiler room approach. Besides this is the approach for high volume tele-sales not lead-gen. A telemarketing lead-gen campaign should be designed to find leads that match a set of pre-defined attributes and hand them over to sales. Marketing managers know that the buyer's profile identifies who is ready to buy and when. And there’s no better way to get this information than by calling a person and asking for it.

So how do you go about making these calls? Well you don’t have to setup a boiler room. A "call center" can be as simple as one person dedicated to making calls for 4 hours a day or 1 day out of the week. It can be 4 people making calls to a wider pool of contacts. It can be 20 people running multiple campaigns for a variety of products or services. It can be members of your customer service team calling past customers and keeping a "power list" up to date. The point is that a call center is whatever you need it to be. If you’re selling to a market of 10,000 potential users and covering the country with a 5 person sales team it might be hard getting around to each contact when they are at the right time in their buying cycle. A couple of tele-reps making nurturing calls may be a more effective use of your money to find the right people at the right time. Lets face it, salespeople are expensive. They are much more successful when they are calling people that are known to be 'in the mood' for your product.

So don't pigeon-hole telemarketing. It can be the single most effective way of getting the sales increases we are looking for. A good lead-gen call center can be whatever it is that you need it to be. The only thing you need to ensure is control of the  the process, the information gathered and transmitting it to the right people at the time they need it. There is nothing more frustrating to a sales person than finding out that the buyer at their last call just upgraded their equipment 3 months ago and their product wasn’t even in the running.

Most lead scoring software focuses on the top of the funnel. A major competitor says “the battle between competitors is being won at the top of the funnel.” Is this true? Who is winning the battle, you or the software companies?

If you think it’s important to have scoring algorithms that can parse out minutiae such as the 15 common misspellings of Mickey Mouse. If you think it’s important to know all the ‘midsize companies in the Western United States’ that may have an affinity for your product, then you will need to hook up with another vendor of scoring software where you can spend your precious resources on pre-scoring criteria. If you want to get to the meat, check out the LeadFish approach.